The Only Exception by Magan Vernon: Guest Post + Giveaway

Synopsis:Fiercely liberal Monica Remy prefers to blend in. Despite her tattoos, piercings, and outspoken personality, she transferred to Central to escape—before she finds out that her next door neighbor is the uber conservative senator’s son, Trey Chapman.No matter how hard she tries to avoid Trey, he still finds a way to get under her skin. Monica can’t stand his crisp white shirts or his staunch views on women. But she can’t help counting every freckle on his face and wondering what it would feel like to have him stop talking politics and kiss her. A class debate project forces the unlikely pair to work together, and the political lines are blurred in late-night make out sessions. But despite their fiery chemistry, Trey’s politics threatens to smother their relationship for good.

Today, we are lucky to have Magan Vernon and she's going to share to us some of her college experiences! :)

Some of the best and worst times of my college experience
took place in my sorority house.

Yes, I fully admit that I was in a sorority and wore my
letters and matching headband proudly.

Some people think that because I write about sorority girls
that I’m just trying to stereotype them, but really I’m just writing about some
of my own experiences in Greek life: The bad, the good, and the ridiculous.

I guess I’ll start out with recruitment, the mecca of all
things Greek. The time in which we recruited new girls into our house. How did
we do that? By gathering in our doorway, all smooshed together, clapping and
singing to them of course! Every sorority had to take songs from pop culture
and replace the lyrics with words about our sorority. I still can’t listen to
“Beverly Hills” by Weezer without singing “Sigma Three, that’s where I want to
be. Living in Sigma three.”

Okay, so actually everyone else sang and clapped. I was not
allowed to clap. The recruitment chair pulled me over to the side. She was a
dancer and I remember she had these long legs and big brown eyes. She leaned
over me, blinking those big brown eyes and stooping down low enough to reach me
with my stubby legs. She then said, “You know I love you, Magan, but you are
kind of clap retarded. If you could just pretend clap, that would be great.”

But my fake clapping was just the beginning. Then we got
into sitting with potential new members and telling them about our sorority and
all of the fun things that we do. Okay, actually we had a big list of the
things that we couldn’t tell them that we did, which was actually all of the
fun things. We couldn’t talk about the DD (designated driver) service we
offered to our members to make sure no one drove home drunk or about sneaking
in alcohol and having late night dance and drinking parties on the third floor.

Instead I talked about the things my sorority did for our
philanthropy like providing money for play therapy for hospitals in Dallas and
North Carolina. This wasn’t something popular to talk about, so naturally a lot
of the girls that I talked to didn’t return for the next round of recruitment.
For the last round we all gathered in our dining room, moving out the tables,
and sang sad songs, and some girls gave testimonials about how much they loved
the sorority. This was the part in which I decided to be myself and got in
trouble multiple times for giggling and talking to the girl I was with and
trying to recruit. But in the end she liked me for me and not anything else
that I tried to pretended to be.

Which is something I’ve taken with me into New Adulthood.
I’m 25 and gave up trying to be something that I’m not. You can’t make someone
like you if you talk about things that you aren’t interested in just to hope
that they will like you back. If you be yourself and someone still doesn’t like
you, then maybe they weren’t worth being friends with in the first place.

Author Bio

Magan Vernon is a Young Adult and New Adult writer who lives with her family in the insurance capital of the world. She is in a very serious, fake relationship with Adam Lambert and constantly asks her husband to wear guyliner. He still refuses. She also believes her husband is secretly an alien, disguised as a southern gentleman.

Oh, this looks interesting! Thanks for sharing with us. I love finding new books by new authors! I always wonder when I think of an author's journey to publishing their own book if there was any other author that inspired them to first sit down and put pen to paper. Thanks for the giveaway!mestith at gmail dot com